The unsung perks of diplomatic open-mindedness

About half the posts I've published so far advocate for a more empathetic approach to human interactions. Most of them assume that your goals already align with achieving "productive" conversations, which could broadly be defined as those that don't end up with each party fuming in frustration and vying for mutually assured destruction. Well... and ideally conclude with some form of progress and closure, meaning having the exact same exchange over and over won't be necessary.

However, everyone doesn't share my starry-eyed ideals. Some don't have too many qualms crushing intellectually inferior miscreants. More generally, a lot of people just don't care that much about the emotional well-being of their interlocutors, especially when the latter have got the gall of being wrong. Facts don't care about your feelings, loser. It's survival of the fittest out there. As such, they'll probably sneer at what they'll consider my attempts to get people to hold hands and sing "Kumbaya."I must note I take offense to this grievous misrepresentation by the way. I don't want to touch anybody's hand if I don't have to, and don't count on me to sing either.

So this time around, I'd like to make my case by appealing to your cold, pragmatic self-interest💡Another perk of offloading this argumentation into its own post is that I don't have to reinject it partially in each subsequent publication covering a similar topic. Instead, I can just refer back to it and avoid needless redundancy.. What's in it for you? What's the incentive for choosing collaboration over domination? Why bother showing some level of respect for other people's right to their own views? What could compel you to forgo the thrill of holy crusades for bland, humble open-mindedness?

Well, you'd be surprised how often callous rationality ends up converging around morality, as long as it's mindful of long-term sustainability that is. Frankly, I think I'm more frustrated by people claiming to strive toward specific goals (e.g. changing people's minds) and going at it in the most dysfunctional and counter-productive way possible than the fact that they're being jerks in the process. If you want to opt for the antisocial playthrough just be efficient and consistent at least, you know.

Improve your own understanding #

Focus on what you can control #

As human beings, it doesn't take very long to be faced with our limits. Our sway on the world and people is no exception. Most of us have only haphazard control over ourselves at best, and the influence we can exert on others is even more fleeting, punier, and overall unreliable.

In reaction to this observation many doctrines, all the way back from Stoicism to Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) and Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) more recently, have advocated for coming to terms with what's not within your power and instead focus your efforts and concerns on what's left, chiefly your mindset, actions and character. After all, the alternative can only lead to wasted struggle and suffering.

The same applies to the pursuit of truth and wisdom. Striving to micromanage other people's opinions is a fool's errand. One is better served by prioritizing the expansion of their own understanding of the universe, others, and themselves. If you happen to help someone's beliefs evolve incidentally along the way, all the better.

Continuous insight assimilation #

I hope you'll forgive me for taking the liberty to assume you haven't reached perfect omniscience yet, which would mean your knowledge is still incomplete. As far as I can tell, the main avenues to work on mending these gaps consist of reflection, exploration, experimentation, and interaction. A decent portion of this includes engaging with differing views.

So don't think of disagreements as fights for supremacy, but rather as exchanges of viewpoints that can help strengthen both sides. Furthermore, invest the lion's share of your energy and intent in strengthening your own and avoid burdening yourself with too many expectations, seeing as they're mostly counter-productive.

You might object that many people have nothing to teach you, but I'd chalk that up to a lack of imagination and ingenuity on your part. The content of a person's belief isn't the only source of knowledge they can offer you. Their subjective relationship with them is another lush wellspring. There's whether their views make sense, and then there's how they make them make sense. Many insights lay dormant, waiting to be revealed through the latter's inquiry.

There's more to learn than meets the eye #

If you peer beyond the face value of your average bog-standard claim, there's plenty of originality to be found for the same idea in an individual's personal history and reasons to subscribe to it, but also the subtle varieties of subjective interpretations it allows for.

It's also perfectly possible to glean new information in spite of—rather than thanks to—someone's intentions. There are many lessons that I've learned from people who were under the impression they were teaching me something completely different.

Admittedly, you can reach diminishing results with some types of interlocutors, especially people who have decided to forsake their individuality to become the representative of an ideology and greatly resist straying from endlessly parroting their in-group's holy or secular scriptures for more than a few seconds no matter what you answer. Once you've become familiarized with said scriptures, they'll have a hard time astonishing you with innovation.

Not everyone shows an equal propensity for original thought, to be sure, but you never know. You'd be surprised what can happen if you stay open to the possibility.

The cost of arrogance and combativeness #

I mean, you can still learn things in spite of arrogance, so spurn the average mind from the height of your mighty brain folds if you so desire. It just means that when you make an oversight, life will have to manhandle you more ferociously before you start listening.

Personally, based on experience, I prefer my karmic Dunning-Kruger sucker punch on the lighter end of the spectrum. The type that doesn't leave me hobbling to reassemble the shattered pieces of my overinflated ego for weeks after the first impact.

In any case, assuming you're sold on the benefits of engaging with different views to refine your knowledge, the question shifts to what is the best approach to pick in order to maximize the odds of learning things from others. We can roughly simplify the options into two main polarities: all-out conflict and receptive exploration.

Some people enjoy partaking in conflict, whether rhetorical or physical, for the thrill of challenge and as a means to assert their power and mastery by dominating the competition. If your goal is knowledge acquisition, however, it makes for a suboptimal strategy.

I'm not saying you can't learn anything from conflict, but the range will be much more limited. Combative defensiveness greatly narrows down the available stream of information. If you're perceived as a potential threat, your interlocutor will raise their guard and be a lot more selective in how and what they're willing to share. So it's in your best interest to avoid triggering this shift of stance if you can help it.

Avoid unnecessary conflict #

Seeing beyond superficial divides #

Humans are biased to let negative data disproportionately affect their overall assessments. Conversations are no exceptions. As soon as any perceived disagreement pops up, it will hog our attention, while previously established consensus will be relegated to the background.

Since most people are conditioned to interpret conflicts as zero-sum gamesSee my post on constructive empathic inquiry for more details. You'll find the link in the conclusion below. and tend to overidentify with their positions, it's unfortunately easy for discussions to devolve into fights for survival as soon as they get stuck a bit too long or too antagonistically on a disagreement.

When we take a step back, let go of the urge to impose our views on everyone elseI expand on this topic in my post Ideological imperialism. You can also find the link in the conclusion below., and take our interlocutor's opinions less personally, it's a lot easier to let these contentions slide with little friction and avoid getting trapped in this death spiral. We're also able to analyze the crux of disagreements level-headedly and realize that they aren't usually as polarized as we first thought.

The severity of dissent is often overblown. People who agree on 90% of their worldview will murder each other over the remaining cosmetic 10%. It's important to see beyond superficial divides. There's plenty of variety to be found in aesthetic preferences for how to frame the same core concept. People tend to get stuck on perceived incompatibilities, but more often than not, it's possible to reconcile differing views with a few shifts in interpretation.

But what we ought to aim at is less the ascertainment of resemblances and differences than the recognition of likenesses hidden under apparent divergences.

– Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

The benefits of perspective fluency #

Don't get me wrong, exploring divergences in favorite framings can be fascinating. It can help us flesh out our understanding of why other peoples' primary modes of making sense of the world differ from ours and how it relates to their values and personalities. A better apprehension of this diversity is also beneficial to delineate our own functioning and quirks more clearly.

As our skills grow with practice, it becomes easier to perceive what is underlying these surface differences, which improves our ability to have productive conversations. Our communication is more efficient since we can use language better attuned to our interlocutors. We naturally shift toward a more analytical stance focused on understanding what they are saying and more detached from ourselves.

As such, we're more concerned with what their discourse might teach us about who they are and what they believe precisely rather than how it might be an indictment of who we are. It allows us to be more relaxed and curious. When disagreements arise, we're less likely to become upset and intransigent, which fosters a virtuous cycle.

We might also come to appreciate that there are countless ways to look at and interpret things and that most hold some value, even if they can sometimes be inadequate depending on context.

To get back to my main point though, as long as people roughly agree with our core values and worldview—enough for peaceful coexistence at the very least—then the stakes of the conversation are pretty low. Is it really worth dedicating decades of your life to rhetorical crusades in hopes of reforming someone's favorite aesthetic wrapping over the same general principle?

Should you want to influence and nudge people's views nevertheless, I believe that a respectful and collaborative approach is still the most likely to bear fruits.

Friendlier conversation, likelier persuasion #

The boomerang effect strikes back #

I don't need a stranger to tell me how to live my life
I don't need a stranger to help me to the light
I don't need a stranger to tell me how to live my life
I don't need a stranger to drag me to the light

– FM Attack feat. Mecha Maiko, "Stranger"

As I mentioned previously, defensiveness completely derails receptiveness. Once you've discounted someone's feelings and needs a bit too hard, the conversation isn't about whatever initiated it anymore. It's now a savage contest of who can twist the other's arm into bending the knee and acknowledging them as the god-emperor of being right (and therefore heard and valid).

Of course, this strategy is completely counter-productive. Just like a Chinese finger trap: the more you force your way out, the more you get stuck. Consequently, everyone is left unsatisfied and miserable in the end. I expanded on the underlying mechanisms of this process in my post on empathy bottlenecks and feedback loops.

Pushing people too hard also significantly boosts their natural stubbornness and pettiness levels. This tendency even has its own official little name in social psychology. It's called the boomerang effect. Argumentatively brutalizing someone has the habit of further polarizing them in the opposite direction of whatever point you were trying to make.

On a similar topic, you might be interested in John Nerst's In Defence of Evidence Resistance post, which unravels why it might not always be all that unreasonable to maintain a modicum of skepticism in the face of your local facts and logic warlord's onslaught of "indisputable" evidence-based postulations.

All that to say, bullying people isn't an effective method to make them see the light. They might pretend to go with it to make it stop, but they'll only be bidding their time, fantasizing about rebellion and revenge. By contrast, it's an excellent way to build resentment and incentivize people to do concerningly foolish things just to get one up on youHave you taken a look at the world's political landscape lately? (ŏ_ŏ˘).

It's true your interlocutors will sometimesOkay, fine... "Often" is probably more realistic. assert dodgy conclusions based on poor epistemological grounding, yet condescension rarely makes for good persuasion.

Patient and lenient counter argumentation #

If you'd like them to reconsider, your best bet is to strive to understand how they came to form these beliefs and gently point out a few flaws. It's even better if you can suggest a few alternatives that can fill in for the same purpose.

Make sure to leave a few escape routes open to give them room to save face, as schmoozing icon Dale Carnegie would tell you. Then, let them mull it over on their own time. It takes a while to change one's mind.

Politely pushing back over several discussions while walking them through your thought process is the best you can do. There's no guarantee it will work, but you can find satisfaction in being a freedom-lovingYes, I'm subtly trying to appeal the American demographic's purported values. As far as I can tell freedom of thought is a tenet of democracy, innit? and courteous conversationalist. The awareness that they're most likely not plotting your demise behind your back is a nice plus too.

Conclusion #

In closing, approaching disagreements with more flexibility allows you to keep refining your conclusions, sidestep needless drama and hassle, and improve your odds of actually convincing recusants. Assuming you're now convinced, you might be wondering where you can find more tangible and concrete practices to ensure these outcomes.

Well, you're in luck. As previously stated, I've been waxing poetic on the topic for about a year, now. After all, the main message of this blog is that dissent doesn't have to be an obstacle but, instead, can be a pillar of sustainable harmonious coexistence. And it turns out interpersonal interactions make up a pretty substantial slice of the dissent pieBut not all of it, either. There's also the matter of internal dissent..

In my post on Epistemic barter, I delve deeper into the best practices to make navigating divergences of opinions enjoyable and constructive. You can also check out the one on Gist triangulation. It's a trick that helps reach mutual understanding faster.

You might be interested in my post on what to consider when evaluating conceptual frameworks: What it can spark isn't bound by what it is, or perhaps my deeper dive on shunning Ideological imperialism, the compulsion to convert others forcefully.

I've also published two posts on understanding and dealing with conflict more broadly. In Why productive conflict resolution is so rare, I explain what gets in the way of resolution. I then give tips on using Nonviolent Communication to avoid these pitfalls in Resolving conflict through constructive empathic inquiry.

Lastly, to qualify my usual nonviolent stance, the next post on my shortlist will address the limits of pacifism, the paradox of tolerance, and at what point I think force becomes warranted. I'll also add a link to it once it's done.

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